The French election

America's friend

Is France ready for Nicolas Sarkozy?

WHAT to expect from a book, published in English, by a French politician and Gaullist presidential candidate? Erudite allusions, lyrical prose, philosophical musings about French gloire and patrie? This is not that book. But, then again, Nicolas Sarkozy is no ordinary French politician.

“Testimony” is more than just the English translation of “Témoignage”, the bestselling volume published last summer by France's interior minister and leading candidate on the right for the presidential elections on April 22nd and May 6th. It is a text remodelled to seduce an American readership, which blends the bold policy ideas from the French version with autobiographical detail from an earlier work, “Libre”. The fondness for America that marks “Testimony” is unapologetic. In the opening paragraph Mr Sarkozy calls America “the greatest democracy in the world”. He elaborates periodically: “If I had to choose, I feel closer to American society than to a lot of others around the world.”

From Charles de Gaulle to Jacques Chirac, latent or explicit anti-Americanism has been a defining foreign-policy doctrine for successive French presidents. This is why Mr Sarkozy's words will both startle and soothe American ears. He not only advocates a fresh start for Franco-American relations. He also declares, more strongly than he did in the French version, that he feels “close to Israel”; he refuses to rule out any option in dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions; and he urges a less forgiving stance towards Russia and China.

Mr Sarkozy's unsparing criticism of contemporary French policy is not limited to foreign affairs. He laments a French culture where work is unvalued, effort unrewarded and material success deemed suspect. “France has been discouraging initiative and punishing success for the past 25 years,” he writes. “And the main consequence of preventing the most dynamic members of society from getting rich is to make everyone else poor.” He advocates an overhaul on many fronts: looser labour laws, fewer taxes, fewer special pension privileges, fewer civil servants and more autonomous universities as well as better opportunities for ethnic minorities.

A more meritocratic, more open, less regulated France would, in his eyes, be a more prosperous and confident France that would be able to count again in the world. “It is precisely because we refuse to address our problems head-on that our flame is diminishing in the eyes of others,” he argues. “It's why other nations' respect for France is declining.”

One of the curiosities of this book is that the politician who has been so refreshingly candid in his denunciation of decades of French political mismanagement has himself been a member of Mr Chirac's government since 2002. He also had a two-year spell, in 1993-95, as a junior minister. Elected as a municipal councillor in 1977, he has spent fully three decades in French politics.

But this is election time in France. Mr Sarkozy needs to appear fresh and novel and, above all, to be different from Mr Chirac, who has been president for the past 12 years. In a section devoted to his strained relations with his one-time mentor, Mr Sarkozy pays him the palest of tributes. What he manages to admire in Mr Chirac are not achievements or policies, but personal qualities: “his energy, his tenacity, his force of character when faced with adversity”.

As it happens, and as the author himself half-recognises in an aside, these are characteristics that Mr Chirac shares with none other than Mr Sarkozy. The man who emerges from these pages is exactly that: energetic, tenacious, forceful in the face of adversity. He appears driven, pragmatic, courageous, non-ideological. This book is not a work of stylistic elegance. Its sentences are short and the prose is often flat. But there is a sleeves-rolled-up urgency to it: here, it seems to say, is a man ready to take on the French. The question is whether the French are ready to take on Mr Sarkozy.